


dear darling

by Sabaxoxoxo



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: 1950's, Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, tiny bit of angst for flavour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25666867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sabaxoxoxo/pseuds/Sabaxoxoxo
Summary: A completely self-indulgent Jamie/Claire 1950's college AU oneshot
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 59
Kudos: 167





	dear darling

**Author's Note:**

> HUGE thank you to Beth, Shrada and Danielle for your patience with my punctuation errors and for helping me stick the landing.

Claire Beauchamp came to Exeter on an overcast day in April.

She wore black slacks, soft leather loafers, and woolen sweaters. Her hair was short, with no curls folded into it; just a few natural twirls a breath away from being raven black that hung choppily beside her ears. She seldom wore lipstick, and if she did, it was a deep plum colour, unlike the strawberry red the other girls would wear. Her knuckles were covered in silver rings that made me wonder what they would look like stirring a cauldron. She smelled like dew sitting on the grass in the morning.

Of course I didn’t notice these details at first. I was hypnotised for a few days by her eyes — an eerie shade of golden, like warm amber dripping from a tree — that sparkled with a wicked presence and sense of purpose.

Exeter College was like any other small town school in England during the ‘50s. All the students blended into one student body, with our white collars and whiter socks. You could have bounced a farthing off our pomade-soaked comb-overs. We were drilled in French conjugations, played polo, and were taught to expect respect.

But we weren’t actually as shiny as we might have seemed. The boys would spend nights in the unkept back gardens, smoking whatever they could buy off the groundskeepers. Meanwhile, their girlfriends cut their wrists, hoping to drain their blue blood so they would be permitted to marry a man of their choosing, rather than the successful banker, lawyer, or doctor their mothers had picked out for them. The one thing that made us the same was that we were deathly afraid of standing out.

Claire Beauchamp stood out.

She was an enigma from the beginning. Gossip about her caught like wildfire in our tiny, boring school community. She was an orphan (I later learned that bit was true); she had a rare blood condition that made her skin so pale; she had been disowned by parents when they found out how she made extra pocket money in London, and was then shipped to Exeter to knead some class into her. She was clearly not from old money — or if she had been, it was gone now. They feared her poverty was catching, as if it would stain like grass on cricket trousers if you walked too close.

Everyday at lunch she would come into the dining hall through the southern entrance, grab a sandwich, and exit through the north door. I would watch her through the window as she crossed the courtyard, her satchel hanging against her thigh and her short springs of hair bouncing with each stride. She would hoist herself up onto the wall, eat her sandwich, and then swing around so her legs hung outside of the school grounds, before she jumped off and disappeared.

The rumours only grew from there. She had a lover; she was an intelligence agent; a witch. I laughed along with the rest of them, not entirely sure that she _wasn’t_ a witch.

One day, I followed her. I told my friends I had to go and see about taking an extra class next term, and followed Claire Beauchamp into the forest.

She walked for fifteen minutes, as purposefully as she did on school grounds. Her strides were long and loud, breaking branches under her soft loafers and whacking leaves out of her way. She was so noisy, I didn’t have to worry about remaining undetected; her racket drowned out my careful steps and soft breathing.

When she finally came to a small hill, I stopped and hid behind an old shed at the edge of the clearing, trying to slow my breathing from the adrenaline of keeping up and keeping quiet.

She had come to a stone circle. It was smaller than the ones where I grew up in Scotland; these stones reached no higher than her hip, and were arranged in a spiral formation, covered with moss and creaking from old age.

Claire Beauchamp sat down at the base of the largest stone with a cleft down the middle. I was half expecting her to undress at that moment, lifting her arms and performing some ritual that would summon her coven, or spirits, or whatever the hell type of mythical creature she might be with her golden eyes and heavenly curves.

“You can come out now,” her voice came, smooth as a moan. I almost passed out from the fright — not entirely sure if she was speaking to her coven, or to me — when she turned her head and locked those glorious eyes with my own, a whisper of a smirk hanging on the corner of her mouth.

I took a few breaths, and came out from behind the shed, eyes trained on the dirt about a foot in front of me, my cheeks aflame, and the tiniest twitch in my cock.

She pulled a notebook and pencil from her bag then, and started writing. My throat was dry, and I swallowed; she probably heard me gulp even from several metres away. Grinding my teeth, I tried to think of an excuse for why I had followed her, when I didn't know myself.

Claire leaned her notebook on her knees and wrote quickly, the smooth scrape of the pencil harmonising with the wind against the leaves overhead.

When I realised she wasn’t going to speak, I swallowed again and asked quietly, “What are ye writing?” I was still too cowardly to look at her face, so I stared at her long, delicate fingers instead as they bent to accommodate the hasty pencil, her silver rings clinking together softly.

“A detailed account of the history of Culloden,” she replied, eyes fixed on the page. Her pencil, however, came up for air as she fiddled with it for a moment, before touching the end to the round pillow of her lower lip, thinking. No lipstick today — just the pale pink cloud that had my tongue sneaking out involuntarily to wet my own lips.

I cleared my throat, deciding that she was being sarcastic (she seemed the type), knowing I was Scottish and hearing my accent. Years of English education in the strictest boarding schools had done little to loosen the brogue tied tightly around my tongue.

I made a joke, asking her not to tell me the end, as I hadn’t reached that part of my history textbook yet. Her eyes flicked up to my face, one brow crooked brazenly in a way that made me want to take her entire bottom lip into my mouth to see if it tasted as soft as it looked.

“Wee joke,” I mustered, my fist clenching inside my pocket as I tried helplessly to stay afloat in the liquid amber of her gaze.

A week may have passed, or a minute, before she finally asked what I wanted.

“I uh... I was going to ask if ye wanted to see that new picture that’s come out. About the assassin. _The_ something-or-other _Man_ , I think it was,” I fumbled.

The single brow arched higher this time, with less of a smirk accompanying it.

“As if you would be game enough to to be seen with me in public,” she laughed. It sounded like a bell.

“Have ye settled in?” I changed the subject, feigning casualness. “Become accustomed to the Exeter ways?”

“I won’t,” she replied shortly.

I was silent for a minute, as she reached into her bag and pulled out a lemonade, unscrewing the lid and taking a swig.

I babbled a little about Exeter’s history then, while I thought about how I could extricate myself from this awkward rendezvous as gracefully as possible.

“So what do ye think?” I ended.

“I told you, I won’t settle in here,” she said, continuing to write. “I don’t think like you lot.”

“No, about the film. This Saturday night. Will ye come with me?”

“What will _the lads_ say?” she mocked, her gaze never leaving my face.

It was my turn to smirk at her awful imitation of my accent. “ _The lads_ ,” I parrotted, playing up the Scottishness, “willna be there. Just you and me.”

//

It was two weeks later, after our fourth film together, in the little shed near the stone circle, that I slipped Claire Beauchamp’s soft white sweater up over her eagerly outstretched arms to reveal even softer and whiter skin beneath.

Her hands were perpetually cold, but they warmed while I held them tightly between us as I rolled my hips and sunk into her slowly, purposefully. The soil from the floorless ground hung to her cheeks like freckles. She watched me vanish into her body before kissing me with those full, round lips that were softer than I had imagined. Her tongue fenced with mine inside our mouths, and when she shattered around me, her golden eyes turned almost all the way black, as if a drop of ink had been spilled into them.

I wanted to stand out with Claire Beauchamp for the rest of my life.

//

On Tuesdays she would come to watch me run. She couldn’t be there during our practices; her advanced biology class ran during our training sessions. But I would hang back after practice, doing lazy laps to cool down until I heard her beautiful voice call out to me from the benches. She would wave, smiling widely, and I would sprint as fast as I could, showing off for her. I knew she would shake her head as I neared the end of the track, consulting her watch before yelling that I had added at least 3 seconds on my personal best; I was losing my touch.

Truth was, I lost everything when she was around.

It was raining one Tuesday when I ran up to her and kissed the raindrops off her lips with a loud smack. Our hair clung to our foreheads, and my running shorts dripped with water. As her fingers twisted around my hair, she kissed me as if she were kissing all the memories we would one day make into me. The air between us evaporated, and I decided I was willing to lose everything as long as I had Claire.

That was the day she told me about her parents. How they had survived the war, only to die in a car crash a year later. We sat on the bench, our noses running in the rain, passing her bottle of lemonade between us. Her head rested on my shoulder as she told me about how her parents had loved her, but their presence in her childhood was limited to late night goodbyes before they flew to their next destination, or early morning “we missed you’s” served upon small, wrapped packages that held poor imitations of the experiences she craved.

She’d always believed her situation was temporary — that one of these days, her parents would wake her up and tell her to get dressed quickly, they were taking her with them this time.

“I was stuck in the same house, in a small town, with the same people all my life. And yet I never felt like I belonged. I’ve never belonged to anyone, really…” she finished, shifting uncomfortably, as if she felt she had shared too much.

I pulled her closer by the shoulder, and kissed the top of her wet hair. “You belong wi’ me.”

\\\

_The lads_ , as she’d called them, did indeed have a lot to say.

First, they realised that I hadn’t actually been attending an archeology class for extra credit during breaks, but instead spent my afternoons excavating the hidden treasures of Claire Beauchamp’s body and mind.

Then, they identified girls at Madame Jeanne’s across town with whom they were particularly well acquainted.

“If ye needed a shag, Jamie, there are better specimens to sample,” Rupert said.

After that, there were reminders about how my allowance was tied to a certain kind of image — one my parents expected me to uphold.

I laughed it off, mostly, if it was in the locker room; grabbed Claire by the arm and turned to walk the other way if I saw them approaching, ignoring the jokes and innuendo they threw around with the intention of being overheard. If Claire noticed, she didn’t say.

A month after the day I’d followed her to the stones, Claire and I sat on the base of the statue of our school’s founding father, discussing what it meant to have a legacy if drunk college students copulated against your memorial after hours. It was dusk, and the low sunlight glistened against her skin. Our hands glided across one another’s, fingers engaged in an intricate dance. I was so mesmerised by the way our palms pressed together, leaving no place in between, that I didn't notice my friends heading in our direction until one of them called out to me.

“Hey Jamie,” Rupert snickered.

I jumped off our perch, cursing in my head.

Angus stuck out his dirty little finger and dragged it along Claire’s shoulder, just above the freckle on her scapula that only I knew about. She smacked his hand away, crossing her arms and almost hissing at him.

I felt a growl in my own throat, and placed a gentle hand at the small of her back, stepping forward. I would have to deal with them at some point; it might as well be now.

What they said next surprised me.

“Will you be taking this little kitty home for your sister’s wedding, Jamie?” Willie asked, walking around to lean on the statue next to me. “Or did you decide that Lily would make a better impression for your parents?”

I smiled out of reflex. I didn't think it was funny, but after years of folding my thoughts and actions into neat little cubes that would slot tidily into a wall of straight lines and right angles, it was an automatic reaction to do what everyone else did.

Claire was standing next to me now, eyes trained on my face. Those wonderful, yellow, spirit-filled eyes were unsure for a moment before they froze over. I could see her teeth grind together in the delicate curve of her jaw.

“What do they think I am?” she asked quietly.

The lads hooted, now clearly more entertained by the bubbling tension than the question they had asked. But I didn’t hear anything other than the bell of her voice.

The one that laughed carelessly when I blew kisses into her belly button. The one that would read aloud the latest chapter of the novel she was writing, hoarse from love-making and husky from page after page of magical prose that made me thirsty to drink up her words along with her spirit.

“I don't… Claire, I—” I faltered.

I usually let my schoolmates think what they wanted. It was easier than trying to explain that there was an entire world beyond what we had been raised to want. And Claire Beauchamp was not afraid to want it; to challenge it; to evolve and adapt.

“What do they think we’re doing?” She shook her head slightly. “What do _you_ think we’re doing? Were you ever going to tell your family about me?”

“I haven't told them _yet_ , but...” I managed.

“Mm,” she said, nodding as if I’d said much more than I had. “Go to hell.”

\\\

I went to my sister's wedding alone. And spent the weekend missing Claire.

I missed having my nose buried in her hair and her breast in my hand when we slept under the pines.

I missed laughing at her snarky comments about affluent society; the most accurate observations I’d never thought to consider.

I missed how she had looked at me right up until that moment under the statue — as if I were the only person in the world she trusted, with a trust that she did not part with easily.

I danced with my sister and mother. I made a speech about how her new husband Ian better look after our Jenny, or else he would be hearing from me.

Claire Beauchamp didn't need looking after. She didn’t let herself be vulnerable. She did it on purpose so she never got hurt.

The one time she was, I hadn’t stepped up to defend her.

\\\

On the last day of term, all the girls went around taking photographs to remember one another by, even though their families would be summering together on the coast. I smiled for a few of them, bought Debby an ice cream from the truck that had been brought in especially for the last day of the year, and then wandered to the stone circle, knowing it was where I would find Claire.

I had visited her one time since I’d returned to school after my sister’s wedding. I’d knocked on her door, even though males were not allowed in the female residential halls, and she’d opened it, expecting to see me.

She had told me to go to hell again, amongst other things.

“You're just like them, Jamie. You're idiots who can’t see past the brim of your polo helmets. You're all the same, all of you!” she snapped, voice low so as not to catch the attention of the matron or the other students.

“You’ve had your fun, messed around with the strange, poor one to add a little flavour to your CV, but you’ll go back just like the rest of them and settle down with Lily, or Milly or whoever the fuck will blow you best.” Her eyes were dry. “I don't need you and your big house with a white picket fence and perfect children, stuck in the cycle of privilege and power. I can do just fine without you.” Her voice had broken finally, ever so slightly, at the end. Her calmness frightened me. She was telling the truth. Even through the love and regret floating in her eyes, I could see that she meant it.

I had sat outside her door after she closed it for a couple of hours, the voice in my head screaming _well, I can’t._ I’d avoided the pointed glares of the glossy blondes returning to their rooms, sitting there until the maid swept me out with the rest of the dirt at the end of the day.

I didn't expect her to speak. I had come to the stones to tell her I would be going to visit Jenny and Ian in London for a few weeks before going back to Scotland for the rest of the summer. I would tell her that I was sorry. That I loved her. And if she could forgive me, ask if she wanted to come with me.

I breathed in, preparing my words.

“I’m going to America,” she said, her voice husky from disuse. “To study medicine.”

“— What?”

“Harvard Medical School. I applied. I didn't tell you because I didn't think I would get in. I did... get in, I mean.” She bit her lip, shrugging slightly. “I wasn't sure if I would take it, at first. But there’s no reason for me to stay here,” she paused. “Anymore.”

Claire Beauchamp had always challenged me. At that moment, she was challenging me to give her a reason to stay, and I couldn’t.

She had always been better than the rest of us. Smarter, braver. As if she were from the future, while the rest of us couldn’t peel ourselves away from the wretched past.

She made me feel brave too, but she was right. My life was the same as the others’. It was a cage. And Claire Beauchamp needed to fly.

So I told her that I was proud of her; I always knew she could do it. Her future patients would be lucky to be in the care of someone as bright and as competent as she was.

I watched as my last chance slipped through my fingers and was carried off on the breeze. She stood, brushed the dirt from her pants and stepped closer, awkwardly.

The wind had picked up and was flicking the ends of her cropped curls into her face. I mirrored her step forward and wrapped one arm around her shoulders, kissing her cheek softly. She smelled like dew sitting on the grass in the morning.

Her fingers hovered weightlessly on my chest for the briefest second before she stepped back and crossed her arms. Her willful gaze never left my face. I wanted to tell her to look away so I could leave. My heart was going a mile a minute.

At long last, I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my white summer slacks, stained with grass at the knees, and left.

\\\

The next time I saw Claire Beauchamp was at the Royal Sussex County Hospital.

With a piercing headache and only one leg, I opened my eyes to see the ones I’d dreamed about for the last ten years.

She stood at the foot of my bed, a clipboard hugged to her chest like a life raft, and her golden eyes swimming with tears. Her hair was long, and perfectly straight.

She looked beautiful.

It made me want to cry.

“Claire,” I said, and tried to smile for her.

She swallowed, chin dimpling, and breathed out deeply.

“I’ve missed ye.”

\\\

On my last deployment in Kenya, I’d lost my innocence along with my leg.

My father had warned me about this.

“Me, my father, his father and on and on and on back, the men in our family have gone to fight in wars so their sons wouldna have to. And now that the godforsaken war is finally over, ye say ye’re joining the army?” he’d shouted. “Are ye mad, Jamie?”

I went anyway. Because the mere thought of going back to school and conjugating more verbs, polishing my shoes, and faking contentment made me sick.

I wrote ahead before my return from every mission, asking for more work so I never had an idle moment in between. My priority was to keep by body active and my mind distracted. And it worked, for a time... until a blast blew my leg off just below the knee.

They sewed me up and shipped me back to the seaside town of Brighton to recover. My head spun every time I opened my eyes.

I didn’t tell Claire everything that first day. It was all I could do to hold her hand as I floated in and out of sleep in my drugged state.

The next two days, I was worse, fevered from the pain and sick to my stomach. I saw her face every time I woke, and didn’t know if she was really there, or just the apparition that had come to me every night since I’d lost her.

At dusk on the fourth day, she came into my room at the end of her shift, removing her lab coat and pulling the chair closer to my bed.

“Claire...” I rasped. “Get me out of here, please?”

“Jamie? What’s wrong? Where does it hurt?” She jumped up again, pressing her fingers to my pulse.

“I’m fine. Claire, will ye… will ye take me outside? To see the stars?”

She began to argue, as I knew she would. I lay still as she jabbered on until she finally stopped, her voice thick with tears, and pulled out the wheelchair.

\\\

I had expected her to take me to the courtyard. But she hauled me into the chair, and pushed me into a hospital car designed to carry wheelchairs.

And then she drove to the beach, just as the last of the sun’s rays sank into the ocean.

I was dizzy, but I gripped the armrests and willed myself to stay upright as she wheeled me right into the pebbles, and then sat on the ground beside me.

We watched the twinkling lights and merriment on the pier in the distance, while the waves slammed on the shore, rolling back seconds before they reached our toes. The ripples reminded me of the way her voice would float around my ears when she used to read me her stories or tell me her dreams.

“You used to say you never wanted to see the violence of war like your father did,” she said, picking up handfuls of tiny pebbles and pouring them around her two feet.

“I was wrong. War builds character. That’s what my grandfather used to say.”

“You lost a leg, Jamie.”

“Means there’s less of me for ye to worry about,” I tried, closing my eyes briefly against the spinning. When I opened them again, she was looking at me, defeated.

“Wee joke,” I said.

That was when I told her about my time in the army. About how the discipline of society life had prepared me for the discipline of the military. I told her it was several years before my first thought every morning stopped being _Claire_.

She told me about America. Hesitantly at first, and then everything at once. Her hair fluttered in the soft breeze, the natural curls teasing their return after standing in straight lines all day. I found myself jealous of the words she spoke, because they lingered on her lips for a moment before she let go of them. God, how I wished for those lips on my own.

And then she told me about Frank — the first British student she had met at Harvard, four years her senior, and exceptionally talented. It was Frank who had gotten her the job at the Royal Sussex, where she had been working for the past year.

“I originally wanted to train in surgery, but then Frank got me this job, saying it was exactly my speed. I’m lucky, I guess. Women aren’t often given these roles.”

I blinked at her passivity. “Is Frank yer…? Are ye…?” I asked, swallowing.

“It’s… well, it’s complicated. But …” She trailed off, hands stilling on the pebbles.

She started to speak again, and then faltered. Claire Beauchamp never used to falter.

The spinning had returned. I took a deep breath of the salty air and exhaled loudly through my nose. “I think it’s time I should be getting back,” I said, shifting uncomfortably, trying to wheel the chair in the pebbles as if I had a chance of ever making it back to the hospital alone.

“What? You’re going to go back by yourself, are you?” My eyes snapped open in recognition of that sarcasm from the old days, and I felt a small smile in my heart.

“If ye’d just wheel me up to the footpath, I can take a bus back to the hospital,” I said, hearing my own stupidity even as I said it.

She rolled her eyes, standing. “Jamie, sit still and I will help you,” she snapped. “You’re going to hurt yours-”

“I’ll not,” I said. “And if I do, it’s my own concern.”

“Will you just shut up for one second?” she yelled, grabbing my face and kissing me hard.

It took several moments for my vision to clear and I looked into her eyes, breathing shallowly. It was several moments more before I finally sighed, and gestured toward my leg.

“I would only hold ye back.” Life with me would still just be a cage for Claire, now more than ever.

“Look how far you’ve come since ye left that jail of a school. I dinna want to hold you back, Claire. And I’ve done without you before, I can do it again,” I lied.

“Well I can’t!”

The waves quietened and the rising moonlight sparkled in the tears on her cheeks.

“Not anymore,” she whispered. “You once said that I belonged with you, James Fraser. Well you were right. And you belong with me. I can’t do without you.” Her voice broke at the end, and I reached for her instinctively.

Her breath came out in a rush and she knelt beside my wounded leg, grasping my hand.

“Oh Claire,” I whispered, brushing a tear off her cheek with my thumb before bringing her hand up to my mouth to kiss her knuckles.

I nodded once, giving in to the way my heart sang out to hers, finally and forever. “Neither can I.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure if it counts as a crossover fic if one of the original stories doesn't actually have a fandom, but I've always liked Campbell and Julia's back story in My Sister's Keeper and so I've mashed that together with all my '50s dreams for Jamie and Claire and called it a oneshot. Hope you enjoyed!


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